Forum:"Other characters" inflation in smashers' infoboxes

Forums: Index → Watercooler → "Other characters" inflation in smashers' infoboxes

This is a known problem on the wiki that has been discussed in the discord, where the "other characters" sections in the infoboxes on smasher articles have been getting ridiculously inflated. These sections are supposed to be for characters the players don't main but have used in tournaments, have busted out as a serious counterpick in actually competitive tournament sets, or at least uses in serious side events such as Squad Strike, they are not for sandbagging characters the top players use to beat up scrubs in pools, and they are definitely not for whatever random character the player fooled around with on their stream one time. The information in the infobox is additionally supposed to be reasonably up-to-date, so a character shouldn't be listed in a player's other characters section if they never play them anymore even if they used to main them, like Bowser Jr. shouldn't be listed among Tweek's characters and Jigglypuff shouldn't be listed among Mango's characters. Information about old characters the player no longer seriously plays should be within the article itself. As a rule of thumb, if the player hasn't used a character in any reasonably competitive tournament sets within the last six months of their career in the relevant game, then the character absolutely should not be listed.

Covid and the predominance of online tournaments do make this situation murkier, as for online tournaments, only character usage in major online tournaments should be considered (as people do mess around with their character choices far more often in lesser free-entry online tournies), and if a player did have an established main pre-covid that they generally don't use online (such as MKLeo with Joker), then it's acceptable to keep the character listed as the player's main despite the aforementioned six months baseline unless the player announced they have officially switched their main.

This isn't a proposal, just a PSA to get the non-discord userbase aware of this problem, and to start making cleaning this up an active collaborative effort; it is a ton to clean up, but if a few of us handle a few smasher articles a day, the problem will get resolved. This page can be used to discuss more grey area cases (such as if a top player has a character they tried to counterpick another top player with but always lost with), as well as anything else related to this issue. Omega Tyrant 00:59, February 23, 2021 (EST)

This is definitely something that should be considered. These sections shouldn't be used for just random fighters the player happened to have used, a line needs to be drawn to what would be considered an "other" fighter rather than just a random fighter they never used in a serious match. I'm not sure about the last 6 month part but whatever helps clean up these sections is welcome in my opinion. Omegα Toαd, the Toαd Wαrrior. (BUP) 01:23, February 23, 2021 (EST)

As someone who had to repeatedly revert and change edits made by new users because they keep adding random characters, I definitely support this. Just one thing I feel like we should also mention. First, if a Smasher says they would main a character, wait until they actually play that character in tournament before adding it. I feel like this is self-explanatory, but unfortunately we still have these kinds of edits, and for some people, if it isn't outright restricted in a guideline they believe it's fine. The only exception to this would be players who are primarily YouTubers such as Alpharad or Little Z , since they seldom attend tournaments (in Alpharad's case, he only attended 2 double tournaments in Ultimate, mostly with sandbagging characters). I believe in this case taking their word for it is fine. CookiesCreme 09:42, February 23, 2021 (EST)